Page 46 of Faking the Heat

“I’m not holding it like anything.”

“You’re holding it like it’s the only thing between you and a subpoena.”

“My parents,” she says, in a whisper that has genuine structural tension in it, “are twenty feet away.”

“I’m aware.”

“My mother spent dinner deciding between June and September.”

“Also aware. I was there. I ate an entire steak during it.”

“Sterling.”

“I’m just saying that I was present and load-bearing for that conversation and I would like some credit.”

She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh but is at least in the same building as one, and her shoulders come down about a quarter inch. I will take a quarter inch.

I go to the bench at the foot of the bed and start collecting pillows.

“What are you doing.”

“Infrastructure.”

I line them up down the center of the mattress. There are four, plus the two decorative ones Carol arrived with this afternoon and installed without discussion, which I now understand were a gift and a warning. I build the thing carefully, seam to seam, and I narrate the process in the flat gravel of a man reading a incident report to a room full of people who would rather be somewhere else.

“Here we have the Great Wall of Hayes. Six units. Rated to withstand nocturnal drift, wandering limbs, and accidental elbow-to-rib contact. Load-tested. Fully compliant. There’s a plaque coming.”

“You are insane.”

“I’m a professional.” I pat the last one into place. “Do you want to see the permits?”

She is laughing now, properly, into the pillow she is still holding, trying to keep it under the volume of her father’s snoring, which is not hard. Something in her spine finally unlocks and she sits down on the edge of the mattress, and I feel about eleven percent better about the whole night.

Then I look at what I have built, and I decide to say it, because one of us has to and it is not going to be her.

“You understand this is a wall of pillows between two people who were in a shower together yesterday.”

She stops laughing. She looks at the wall. She looks at me.

“I was choosing not to think about that,” she says.

“How was that going.”

“Extremely well. Flawlessly. I hadn’t thought about it once.”

“Not once.”

“Maybe twice. In an academic way.”

“Academic.”

“Scholarly,” she says. “Detached. The way you’d think about a documentary.”

“Mandy, you have been standing in one spot holding a pillow for a minute and a half.”

“That’s my process.”

I get in on my side. The mattress telegraphs every shift, which is a design flaw I have never once noticed until tonight and now consider the single greatest failure of American manufacturing. She gets in on hers. We lie there on our backs in the dark with six pillows between us like two people in adjacent hospital beds.